REMEMBER – Fiery Furnaces (Thrill Jockey/Fuse)
So-called independent music has mutated, self-immolated and turned inside on itself so many times in the 1990s to make genres meaningless. It’s all just one endless colonic irrigation and, hey, guess what, you can get your fix by download these days. So who’s to say where New York City’s Fiery Furnaces sit in the constantly evolving and divergent scheme of things?
To be honest, I’d scarcely heard of Fiery Furnaces other vaguely knowing they were a brother-and-sister duo with backing band - in the style of an electronic White Stripes. When this double album of live stuff popped out of the post office box, the befuddlement was palpable.
So check this out: Two-plus hours of songs that blend into each other like the world’s longest medley, some of them with tweaked lyrics matched to radically altered re-arrangements. If you want a tracklist that makes sense you have to download it. The CD slick warns the album shouldn’t be played in one sitting. Sonically-speaking, it’s booming basslines and electronica interspersed by fuzzy guitar, with lyrics sung/spoken by one of the principals, Eleanor Friedburger, in a monotone that occasionally borders on the sultry but often sounds plain bored.
I thought the song about being a battered wife was OK but I started losing the thread midway through the second re-working that followed. I could be brave and niche these guys as some sort of Suicide for Generation Facebook but I’m not hearing anything as angry or unhinged as “Frankie Teardrop”. For chrissakes, I hear they had their late grandmother sing folk songs on one of their seven (!) previous albums (presumably before she passed on.) If I’m not in Fiery Furnaces’ demographic, I don’t know where the late Granny Friedburger fitted in, but all the best to her.
You have to at least give these guys/gal credit for the fact that their act is almost entirely lacking in spontaneity with arrangements remembered to the note. Before you say I'm damning with faint praise, wasn't that the hallmark of the Magic Band?
An exercise in post-modern re-invention, perversity and absurdity rolled into one package, this won't row my boat but your take may be radically different. I'm not in the demographic and it would probably be uber-uncool to be anything approaching a fan, anyway.Indie kids say the darndest things. - The Barman
